Star Wars with occasional sarcasm

Category Archives: fiction

Awards. The Hugo Award winners were announced at Worldcon this past weekend. Taking Best Novel was Jo Walton’s Among Others, beating out George R. R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons and works by China Miéville, James S. A. Corey and Mira Grant. (Walton also won the Nebula for the book.) Other writing prizes went to Kij Johnson, Charlie Jane Anders, Ken Liu and more.

The dramatic presentation awards went to Game of Thrones S1 and Neil Gaiman for his Doctor Who episode ‘The Doctor’s Wife.’ (Gaiman took the opportunity to announce he’s writing another episode for the show.) Also noteworthy to us, SF Signal winning for Best Fanzine!

Tolkien. With Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit adaption now being three films, the second has been retitled The Desolation of Smaug, with There and Back Again now being the third installment. I fully expect it to contain at least an hour of various slow-motion endings. But seriously, it looks like there was a lot of hints dropped at DragonCon.

A British newspaper is reporting that a 40-foot He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and Mary Poppins – among other noted characters of British literature – will be featured in the Opening Ceremonies of the London Olympics on Friday. The Sunday Times writes:

About 30 actors each depicting Mary Poppins, the magical English nanny played by Julie Andrews in the 1964 Disney film, will descend from the roof of the stadium on wires and “float” to the ground with their opened umbrellas. The nightmare will be banished and happiness restored. “It’s a jaw-dropping sequence,” said one source.

If this is true, it’s going to be completely batshit. I hope it’s true.

It’s long been rumored that Lionsgate would follow in the footsteps of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Twilight: Breaking Dawn, but now it’s official: The adaption of the third Hunger Games book will be two movies, Deadline reports.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 will debut on November 21, 2014, with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 on November 20, 2015. The second adaption, Catching Fire, is slated for November 22, 2013 and due to begin filming early next year.

Does Mockingjay need two movies? Well, it’s not a huge book, ala Deathly Hallows, but there is quite a bit going on that could be expanded on… As we saw in The Hunger Games, opening the story up beyond Katniss’ immediate point of view gives a more detailed version of the story, and of all the books, Mockingjay may have the most spaces to fill. So while, yes, it’s an obvious money-grubbing, franchise expanding move, it could work out very well.

In other Hunger Games news, Lionsgate yesterday confirmed the first casting for Catching Fire: Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) will play Plutarch Heavensbee, the new Head Gamemaker. It’s been reported that Jena Malone (Donnie Darko, Sucker Punch) has been offered the role of Johanna Mason.

Bradbury is probably best known for Farenheit 451 (bane of many a high school English student) and The Martian Chronicles. But he was a prolific writer of so much more than can be listed here, so we’ll send you to his own chronology. You might be surprised at the titles you recognize there from his own printed works to the titles that eventually became television or movies.

So we’ll close out with some inspiration from the man himself:

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

Awards. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America gave out the Nebula Awards last weekend, and I’m shocked that my pick, Jo Walton’s Among Others, took the novel prize. Other winners include Kij Johnson, Geoff Ryman, and Ken Liu.

A Neil Gaiman-penned episode of Doctor Who, ‘The Doctor’s Wife,’ took the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze won the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. Connie Willis was honored as a Grand Master, and the Solstice Award (“for those who have made a consistent, positive, major difference in the genre”) went to the late Octavia Butler and John Clute.

First look. Aaron Allston is currently revising his novels Doc Sidhe and Sidhe-Devil, and offers an early look at the new cover for Doc Sidhe. He hopes to make a new edition of the book available in the summer. In other Allstony news, he’s among the authors of a new short story anthology that will be published at Origins Game Fair , where, coincidently, several Club Jaders will be next week. Timothy Zahn and Michael A . Stackpole also have stories, as well as a few other names that may be familiar.

Comics. Marvel will be hosting its first gay wedding in June, as X-Man Northstar weds his partner Kyle in Astonishing X-Men #51. Northstar, a founding member of Alpha Flight, (the Canadian Avengers, apparently) has been out of the four-color closet since 1992. Making use of their parent company’s corporate clout, Marvel announced the move on morning talk show The View.

We’re in a dry period for Star Wars books, with nothing but reprints for the next couple months, but certain Jaders may be interested to hear that the third and final book of Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy, Blackout, is out today. Despite being fairly adverse to zombies, I recommended the first book, Feed, way back in 2010.

Yesterday afternoon, Moviefone.com (a division of AOL) posted an article by Jessie Heyman initially entitled “Girl’s Guide To The Avengers: What You Need To Know If You Know Nothing.” After the internet community got a hold of the article (including yours truly) and the outrage began to spawn on Twitter and other sites, the title was amended to “One Girl’s Guide…” because, according to the Editor’s note that was inserted, the intent was not to make female superhero fans feel marginalized and the satirical nature of the piece didn’t come through. Female superhero fans feeling marginalized? Satire? Really? Is that what you’re going to go with?

Big news for e-book lovers. The parent company of Tor, one of the biggest SF/F publishers, announced today that they’re going to make their ebooks DRM-Free. This is a pretty big deal – and it looks likely means we’ll likely see more cross-polinating on the existing readers. But I’m no expert – you’ll want to check in with folks like John Scalzi and Charles Stross.

On another note, I swear I’m almost done, you really, really want to go and buy The Price of Stars for $2.99. I have an entire post to write about the Mageworlds series, but who knows if it’ll still be on $2.99 then? $2.99!

Awards. I am shamefully late in writing about the Hugo Award nominations, for which I apologize. The novel nominees include George R. R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons, Mira Grant’s Deadline and Jo Walton’s Among Others, which I gushed about back in the Nebulas. There are plenty of other familiar names in the media categories (Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who, even Community) but the news that made waves was that the blog SF Signal is up for best fanzine. They were so excited that they made an infographic. NERD PARTY! No, seriously, it’s pretty neat.